Brain Freeze

Back in 2012 (June 8), Business Insider compared the average annual cost of a college education against the median income of a number of countries. Schooling is so heavily subsidized in China that it makes no sense to compare. So let’s look at Western, developed nations. Countries like France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway, for example, all provide college educations for less than 5% of their median incomes.  New Zealand was at a tad over 16%, the U.K. around 21%, Canada a whopping 24%... but as expected, the United States hit over 51%, a number that is even more staggering when our higher wages are taken into consideration.

With around $1.3 trillion in student debt and a bankruptcy code that was specifically amended to make discharging student loans next to impossible, the United States is not only one of the most expensive countries for a college education but the most hostile to students and their families in need of financial support. A short-sighted Congress has added to the misery by decreasing support to colleges and universities and cutting back on grants and loans (Pell Grants, aimed at supporting needy student, have been slammed, year after year). GOP-dominated state legislatures, typically hostile to academia in general, have paralleled federal attitudes and added the additional hardship of increasing tuition at state schools just as the economy plunged.

“[The] reduction in state and federal appropriations to state colleges, [is] causing the institutions to shift the cost over to students in the form of higher tuition. State support for public colleges and universities has fallen by about 26 percent per full-time student since the early 1990s. In 2011, for the first time, American public universities took in more revenue from tuition than state funding. Critics say the shift from state support to tuition represents an effective privatization of public higher education. About 80 percent of American college students attend public institutions.” Wikipedia

What’s worse, as global competition is ramping up, as foreign hard patent filings – particularly in Asia – are flying upwards, we are seeing little to no growth in the filing of hard patents in the United States. Why? As educational opportunities are escalating overseas, making college more affordable to more people, our tuition costs have vastly exceeded normal inflationary increases for decades now.

“Cost of living increased roughly 3.25-fold [from 1978 to 2008, noting that after 2008, state tuition increases have risen even higher]; medical costs inflated roughly 6-fold; but college tuition and fees inflation approached 10-fold. Another way to say this is that whereas medical costs inflated at twice the rate of cost-of-living, college tuition and fees inflated at four times the rate of cost-of-living inflation. Thus, even after controlling for the effects of general inflation, 2008 college tuition and fees posed three times the burden as in 1978.” Wikipedia.

So as the United States seems to have no problem decimating its economic future in a slow commitment to national suicide, an occasional attempt to remedy the situation, even token gestures, come to the fore. As lame duck President Barack Obama proposes tuition-free education for all at two-year community colleges as a start, I am reminded that anything that the President embraces is almost always opposed by the GOP-controlled Congress… just because he proposed it. Americans seem to like the Affordable Care Act, but when it’s labeled “Obamacare,” a huge number of ACA supporters want to repeal it instantly.

In a speech in Knoxville, Tennessee on January 9^th, “Mr. Obama vowed to make college affordable for all Americans by investing $60 billion over the next 10 years to provide free community college tuition to as many as nine million students a year across the country. If Congress and the states adopted his plan, the president said, ‘two years of college will become as free and universal as high school is today.’

“But even as Mr. Obama hosted three Republican lawmakers from Tennessee on Air Force One for the trip from Washington, his adversaries on Capitol Hill showed little interest in signing on to a new and costly initiative that extends the federal government’s reach into education policy, no matter that it is modeled partly on a program created by Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Haslam…

“Even if his plan gains no traction in Congress, the president is laying claim to a big idea at a time when lawmakers are planning to renegotiate the Higher Education Act that governs federal financing of college education. Democrats believe that tackling the cost of college is an issue that plays to their strengths — one they can run on in 2016.” New York Times, January 9^th. But even Democrats are wondering where the money will come from and whether they can run campaigns with platforms that call for additional government spending.

If we do not spend money on education now, education that will increase the competitive advantages and earning power of Americans (hence generating more taxes for the government to pay down our deficits), we are going to spiral more in debt – as military and homeland security measures, responding to massive disaster relief as our aging infrastructure fails against expect climate issues and funding our existing debt consume an increasing share of our budgets – with a decreasingly number of productive Americans earning enough to pay for it all. Until Americans wake up and begin to understand the difference between spending without an expectation of a return and truly investing in our future, we are going to accelerate a national decline that could so easily have been prevented.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we need a reality check and a wake-up call if we give a damn about our future.